The Crisis Awareness Of Don Delillo’s Post-modern Fictions

Born on November20,1936, Don Delillo is an outstanding contemporaryAmerican post-modern novelist.15novels and3plays of him had been published, aswell as numerous short stories and essays. Although his literary works filled withdetails of violence, disasters of ecology environment, the combination of rights andmedia discourse, etc, which threatens the survival of human survival, he always keepa clear mind while examining the individual crisis that everyone facing.Five novels were chosen in this essay: White Noise, Libra, Name, Metropolitan,The falling man as the objects of study.These fictions reflect the most of the author’ssense about the survive, the urgency, the responsibility, the duty of the development ofAmerican society, individual surviving, shows the full dissection and critique thephenomenons of American society and culture. This crisis of American post-modernsociety includes the individual crisis, which was characterized by domesticindifference, void innermost feelings and life’s symbolization, as well as the publiccrisis that characterized by ecological pollution, media overflow and social instability,which all illustrates the writer’s strong sense of responsibility in criticizeconsumerism and instrumental rationality, and his wish of reforming the world,restore ecological balance and harmonious coexistence.At the same time, this paper obtains the source of Delillo’s crisis awarenessthrough discussing the writer’s national identity, personal experience and the traditionof criticizing in American literacy, and compare the crisis awareness of Chinesecontemporary authors with Delillo. In the end, this essay analysis the author’scountermeasures about regress to nature, reconstruct the concept of values, etc. Thereare some positive references to the Chinese writers, but also some negative facts thatneed to be coped with our dialectical attitude. But it is certainly sure that Delillo’sstrong sense of crisis in social development, fits for the Chinese traditional values“Thrive in calamity and perish in soft living”, and it has important spiritual drivingforce to promote the social development.